1. Technical Field
The invention relates to an image processing technology for executing deformation of an image.
2. Related Art
An image processing technology for deforming a digital image has been known, which is, for example, described in JP-A-2004-318204. JP-A-2004-318204 describes an image processing that deforms the shape of a face in such a manner that a portion of an area on the image of the face (an area that shows the image of a cheek) is set as a correction area, the correction area is divided into a plurality of small areas in accordance with a predetermined pattern, and the image is enlarged or reduced by a scaling factor set for each small area.
In the above existing image processing for image deformation, because enlargement or reduction of an image is performed for each of a plurality of small areas by a scaling factor that is set for each of the small areas, the processing is complicated. In addition, the above existing image processing for image deformation is exclusively configured for correcting the line of a cheek, and it is difficult to be used for other various deformation modes. In the existing art, when a human face is detected, the detected face (the area of a portion of a face) is simply corrected to be deformed. Therefore, when a plurality of faces are present in image data, all the faces will be a target for deformation. However, when the deformation process is always performed on all faces, it results in an increase in amounts of processing and an increase in memory utilization for a buffer, or the like, at the time of computing. In particular, an increase in memory consumption or processing load owing to the above deformation process becomes a large burden on an image processing apparatus called a multifunctional printer having multiple functions, such as a printer function, a copy function and a scanner function and, hence, interferes with operation of the image processing apparatus.